The 45years of foreign direct investment research: Approaches, advances and analytical areas

What are the main tenets associated with foreign direct investment (FDI)? What research has been performed in the area of FDI to date? Which direction should research in this field proceed in the days to come? As there is no article with comprehensive coverage of all the studies on FDI, we review empirical research in this area between the years 1970 and 2014 as an attempt to answer these questions. We identify the advances and analytical areas of FDI research, list out the impactful research papers and authors, theoretical and methodological approaches, leading journals and variables of interest that exist in the area of FDI research. As the research into the FDI has advanced significantly over the last two decades, we have also tried to point out the gaps in the literature. Taken together, our paper highlights the heterogeneous nature of FDI across countries and firms.